Album von Bremen — Ernst Roepke, Wiesbaden (1891)

Opening

Twelve photographs. Twelve places. A city photographed once, on glass plates coated with egg white, in the year a Kaiser still ruled Germany and Bremen's ships were crossing the Atlantic with emigrants by the thousand. The album folds flat, fits in a coat pocket, and opens like a concertina to reveal a city that no longer entirely exists.

The Object

Album von Bremen is a souvenir photographic leporello published in 1891 by Ernst Roepke of Wiesbaden, containing twelve original albumen silver print photographs of the city of Bremen mounted on card stock in an accordion-fold binding with a green cloth cover gilt-lettered on the front. Each photograph carries a printed caption and a catalogue number in the range 2284–2295, placing this album within Roepke's wider commercial series of European city views.

The leporello format — an accordion-fold structure in which individual card leaves are joined at their edges to form a continuous strip — takes its name from Leporello, the servant in Mozart's Don Giovanni (1787) who produces a long fold-out list of his master's conquests. By the 1880s the leporello had become the standard format for photographic souvenir albums across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. The twelve photographs are albumen silver prints — the dominant photographic medium from the mid-1850s until approximately 1895, when gelatin dry plates and bromide papers displaced them. Each print was made from a glass plate negative exposed on location in Bremen, then contact-printed onto paper coated with a layer of egg white sensitised with silver nitrate. A standard twelve-print run would have required the whites of several dozen eggs. The Schutz-Marke (registered trademark) notice printed in the album reflects the German trademark law of 1874, one of the earliest modern trademark protection systems in the world.

The Maker

Ernst Roepke was a publisher and photographic album producer based in Wiesbaden, active in the late nineteenth century. He operated a substantial catalogue of souvenir city-view leporello albums — the series numbers in this Bremen album reach at least 2,295, indicating a production run spanning dozens of European cities and resorts. His albums are documented for destinations including Lucerne, Norderney, and multiple German spa and port cities, all produced in the same format with the same house style of gilt-lettered cloth covers and numbered albumen prints.

Wiesbaden was a natural base for this kind of publishing. As one of the great Wilhelmine spa towns, it attracted wealthy tourists from across Europe and had an established trade in quality printed souvenirs. Roepke's operation sat within a broader network of German commercial photographers and publishers who supplied the souvenir album market across the German-speaking world during the 1880s and 1890s. The photographer who made the original glass plate negatives is not named in the album — standard practice for commercial souvenir publishing of this period, where the publisher rather than the photographer held the commercial rights. The imprint on the final leaf reads: Ernst Roepke. Wiesbaden 1891. with the Schutz-Marke notice.

The City in 1891

Bremen in 1891 was a prosperous, self-governing city-state — one of the three Hanseatic Free Cities of the newly unified German Empire (alongside Hamburg and Lübeck), with its own constitution, senate, and deep tradition of mercantile independence. The city's wealth rested on Atlantic trade: Bremen was the principal German port for the emigrant trade to America, and the Norddeutscher Lloyd shipping line, founded in Bremen in 1857, had become one of the largest passenger shipping companies in the world. The Freihafen (Free Port) photographed in this album was the physical expression of that commercial identity.

The Rathaus (Town Hall), built between 1405 and 1410 in the North German Brick Gothic style and given its present Renaissance facade in 1609–1612, stands on the north side of the market square. Immediately in front of it stands the Roland, a 5.5-metre stone figure erected in 1404 — the symbol of Bremen's right to hold a free market and its independence from the authority of the Archbishop. Both the Rathaus and the Roland were inscribed together as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2004, 113 years after this photograph was taken. The Ratskeller, the vaulted wine cellar beneath the Town Hall, has operated continuously since 1405 and also falls within the World Heritage designation. The Bleikeller (Lead Cellar) beneath the nearby St Petri Cathedral has been a public curiosity since the seventeenth century, its cool, dry air naturally mummifying bodies stored there. The Wallanlage — photographed here as Parthie aus der Wallanlage — was laid out in the early nineteenth century on the filled-in moat and demolished ramparts of Bremen's medieval fortifications, transforming the former defensive perimeter into a continuous public green promenade encircling the old city.

The Twelve Photographs

2284 — Panorama. General panoramic view of the city.

2285 — Rathaus. Town Hall, built 1405–1410, Renaissance facade 1609–1612; UNESCO World Heritage 2004.

2286 — Rolandsdenkmal. Roland statue, 1404, symbol of Bremen's civic freedom and market rights; UNESCO World Heritage 2004.

2287 — Börse. Stock Exchange, centre of Bremen's Hanseatic commercial life.

2288 — Reichspost. Imperial Post Office, built under the unified German Empire.

2289 — Bleikeller. Lead Cellar beneath St Petri Cathedral, famous since the 17th century for natural mummification.

2290 — Ratskeller. Vaulted wine cellar beneath the Town Hall, in continuous operation since 1405.

2291 — Rathhaushalle. Great Hall of the Town Hall interior.

2292 — Gewerbehaus. Commerce House, headquarters of Bremen's merchant and artisan guilds.

2293 — Freihafen. Free Port and harbour, the engine of Bremen's Atlantic trade and emigrant shipping industry.

2294 — Parthie aus der Wallanlage. Scene from the Wallanlage, the public park ring laid out on the demolished medieval fortifications.

2295 — Marktplatz. Market Square, the civic heart of Bremen, flanked by the Rathaus and the Roland.

Significance

As a physical object, this album is a primary photographic document of Bremen as it stood in 1891 — before the Allied bombing raids of 1944 that destroyed large areas of the historic centre. Several of the buildings depicted were damaged or altered in the twentieth century; the album preserves their appearance at a specific moment that no longer exists in full.

As a photographic artefact, it is a representative example of the late albumen print era at its commercial peak. Albumen printing was already in decline by 1891 — gelatin bromide papers were faster, cheaper, and more durable — and within a few years the medium would be largely displaced. The series numbers 2284–2295 are a reminder that this album is a small fragment of a much larger and almost entirely unresearched commercial photographic archive. Roepke's catalogue ran to at least 2,295 numbered views; each surviving album is evidence of an enterprise that documented European cities at street level with a consistency and geographic range that no single artistic or governmental project of the period matched.

Bibliographic Details

Publisher: Ernst Roepke, Wiesbaden, Germany

Date: 1891

Imprint: Ernst Roepke. Wiesbaden 1891. Schutz-Marke (registered trademark)

Format: Leporello (accordion-fold); green cloth cover, gilt lettering

Photographs: 12 albumen silver prints, catalogue nos. 2284–2295

Process: Albumen silver print from glass plate negative

Country of Origin: Germany